Early Announcement:
We are excited and honored to announce that Project-Spark.org will be the host of the next Project Spark GameJam. This Community GameJam will be sponsored by Team Dakota and an additional awesome sponsor, both o

So Project Spark now has rainbows. It's a thing. I can only think of one person who would have asked for such a thing, but they now have it. The rainbow, like everything else in Spark, can have it's colors tinted, so they don't HAVE

Zack joins me on the 34th episode (not 35th, whoops) to discuss the upcoming Treasure Trove and the additional 2D shadowless icons being added to the existing icons pack. Other topics such as Conker are raised, and towards the end Zack gives a

In tomorrow's tutorial, Zack will show you show to make cool portals, check it out live at noon Pacific on twitch.tv/project_spark or if you miss the live version, I will grab their video after they upload it to YouTube.

In this week's Extra Credits Highlight, they break down what a choice is, and how it can be used to promote conflict within games, in order to make them more interesting to the user. Keeping this in mind while making your level in Spark should

Today's stream had a pair of surprises, both of which involved giving more stuff to users. One will give additional content to users who had already obtained the 2D icons pack, while the other was basically a bonus give away to users for loggin

On this latest SparkCast, Brian joined me to talk about the things they can not yet talk about, and Jeff Guy risked the existance of Project Spark to stop by and chat about his role and journey to Team Dakota, Conker, as well as the future of Project

Today at noon Pacific (3pm Eastern), Zack and/or Brian will be covering what Brian has dubbed "The Isle of Misfit Kode", explaining the basics of kode tiles which are relatively easy to use, very powerful, but underused by the community. In som

The Get Started Bundle contains the Nomadic Warrior (basically the female version of the Male Fighter, but has a much cooler helmet, one of my favorite pieces of equipment in the game, actually), her sword, a stone sword and 3 days of Spark Premium.

Extra Credits was recently approached to do a series of videos by Unity, another game creation engine, based on creating your first game. Even though this is meant to be towards Unity, most of the content is relevant to Spark, and in many cases

Brian was joined by award winning lead concept artist Jedd, and Matt from the design team, who had done all of the level art for Champions Quest, to critique and do a makeover for a user generated level.
Jedd personally likes to take ice bergs from the arctic biome, recoloring them and using them to cover large swaths or area, instead of just using terrain. In general he thinks the desert and arctic biomes could be integrated more into UGC.
Matt suggests starting on the large scale first...

When playing Project Spark you may have been playing some UGC when you stumbled across a game made for the Xbox with Xbox controls. This makes it difficult to play on PC due to not knowing what buttons to press, sometimes making them unplayable.

Here are the PC equivalent controls to the Xbox so you can play Xbox games on your PC

Since joining Spark as an alpha tester last year, I have spent the majority of my in-game hours building prop assemblies for myself and others. I believe this focus has allowed me a lot of insight into the various tools and features of the editor, and I'd like to give my perspective and some suggestions on how to make it easier to use and more intuitive for new users.
Overall I find it to be relatively easy to use, and generally powerful enough to accomplish anything we as a co...

In this episode, they examine what makes a game engaging, depth and complexity, and eventually determine one to be superior to the other. We can see some of these in Spark levels, where having a few mechanics done well can produce a more enjoyable experience than trying to figure out a myriad of controls and rules to play a level. With that said, I think adding more complexity as a level progresses is fine, as long as the added complexity actually improves the experience.
...

Zack from Team Dakota, the creators of Project Spark, joins Paradoxmoose for a live podcast discussing Project Spark and adjacent topics such as:The upcoming emote packSuggested homework for new, intermediate and advanced creatorsThe history of the Spark Squirrel, and early concept artPsychology in video gamesProject Spark at GDC- feel free to join them thereAnd various questions from the community are answered
Link to the early critter concept art: http://www.atomhawk.com/media/spark/s...

This Tuesday Zack and Brian each took turns breaking Brian's Dragon Age Inquisition level, and making the other figure out how to debug to fix it. See if you can figure out how to fix it along with Zack, who was a bit more in the dark than Brian, and learn some of the basic debugging practices to use in Spark (in short, use the display tile)....

Team Dakota are in the process of designing improvements to the UGC (User Generated Content) Feed inside the game. They have reached out to us to provide them with input as to what we would like to see done. All users are encouraged to not only come up with ideas for what they would like, but also support the ideas of others when applicable. I will go over some of the more frequently discussed topics, and all readers are strongly encouraged to give their feedback as they see fi...

As users advance their game creation skills, it is important to keep in mind making the experience enjoyable, in addition to being interesting. In this sense, the creators can learn how to nudge the player into getting the most out of what your level has to offer. As a result, I am combining these two videos, affordances, and balancing for skill, to keep in mind when designing the conent and mechanics within your levels....

The first Project Spark Gamejam has reached its conclusion, but there are many things that are to be learned from the process, and applied to those in the future- because there will be more.
The most obvious change, as it has been requested the most frequently, is to have the competition be international. Since they have already stated their desire and intent on doing so, I just wanted to mention that before moving on.
The prizes this time along were...

Congratulations to the winners! "Final" is in quotations because if anyone is found to not be elligible, things will change!
Rube Sparkberg: RaffArundel for Fire Start! This was a highly contested field, I loved all of the finalists, so I couldn't have picked one over the others, but the hand-gliding squirrel may have been for the win.
Primitives: LordStarwalker for Primitive Quest! I couldn't make a call in this field, either, but they really focused on making primitive versions of co...

The GameJam results were not released today, but rather subset to the top 20. (Listed below)
The final five, including the grand prize winner, will be announced this week, hopefully Tuesday or Wednesday (because anxiety), on an official live stream (twitch.tv/project_spark)
Rube SparkbergTurning on a TV by AnAverageReconThe Strange Isle of Sparkberg by chobithedekichiClockwork Catastrophe by killenjokeFire Start by RaffArundelIt Moves Like ThatX-Zero by ArisildeDamalSpace Gunk vs The Gal...

The 40 finalists for the first Project Spark Gamejam have been announced, and they are as follows:
Snake. Matrix style. by AsperatidMultiplayer GameJam Pack by Agent BladeTurning on a TV by AnAverageReconX-Zero by ArisildeDamalCLOUD NINE v2 by BubbDJ000Reactor by charlottiThe Strange Isle of Sparkberg by chobithedekichiPrimitive World by DaimwnLet's Get Primitive by DefcoThe Fall of Hestault by DigitaLDevil808Play as a Doctor by ElysianRainRefrigerators Are Better Than People by Ian Withers 87S...

The Artist Feature pack has arrived; I finally have my hands on it, and along with it came the teaser image for the next content pack- Kodian Archives.
So starting off, the Artist Feature pack. Rusty joined the stream team, along with Rahul, to go over the creation of lava from the teaser video, and Rahul had a few quick announcements at the end of the stream, as well.
Terrain tinting is the star of the show, and will likely have the most prevalent impact on user created levels, le...

We have spent some time looking back at Spark as we knew it from Octvember to the first Gamejam, so now it is time to look ahead for what can be expected from Spark in 2015, as well as put forth our own wishlists for the upcoming year.
The closest events in Spark are the conclusion of the Gamejam and the Artist Feature pack. The Artist Feature pack is coming this week (following the small update, which does not have an exact date as of yet), and the Gamejam results should be finalized and made ...

It has been a little over a year since Project Spark entered beta, and only a few months since Official Release, but there were plenty of great first strides towards game development within the community. There were many levels worthy of consideration, and as such there are several honorable mentions and runners up, all deserving of a thumbs up and a pat on the back for a job well done.
First, the honorable mentions and runners up. These levels were solid contenders, and valid argum...

There were a handful of levels uploaded at the last moment last night that may otherwise be overlooked by the public, and I will try to cover them as well as a few levels which I did not catch prior.
The first entry is by the creator of Super 16+, Defco 7T in the primitive category- naturally. In "GameJam - Let's get Primitive Defc", the gameplay isn't finished, but given the category, I don't think that is a major negative. Looking at the primitives- it has the potential to...

Back with few more entries that are certainly worthy of your time to check out, and putting in an upvote when you have finished.
The first entry is "X-Zero", which is pretty well publicized at this point. It is a racer somewhat inspired by the classic F-Zero, in the sense that it emphasizes speed, but don't look for mechanics from the original to be adapted into Spark with this, they opted to instead go with integrating a booster and a sharp turn mechanic. It definitely has some nic...

Last week one of the cooler content packs was released by Team Dakota. Operation MOLE is the next addition to the Sci-Fi line of packs, and comes with another piece of the Scoundrel equipment.
It's difficult to pick a few pieces of content to highlight in this pack, as they are virtually all stand outs. There are numerous props which expand the human space-architecture, and expand on our ability to re-purpose them to be anything from space ships to turrets.
The special effect...

In this first installment of Upvote Worthy, I will pick out a few of my favorite Gamejam submissions thus far.
The first entry kills me, because it is fantastic, whimsical and I found it genuinely funny, but it used the default title and screenshot, which will make it difficult or users to actually seek out and upvote. Without further ado-
GameJam - Rube Sparkberg by RaffArundel
It starts off with a quick dialogue between two characters on how to light a fire to stay warm- and then usin...

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Will be publishing a partial version for people to take an early crack at this.
I'm narrowing down which features will be in this initial version now and will be cleaning things up.
I will need feedback on the methods of customizations from early "testers".
The first version will only have primitive cube walls and not prop walls or terrain wall options. The player will be able to play through endless amounts of unique dungeon floors killing various simple enemies. There is a "village" with a shop that may or may not contain some items to purchase.
Customizations may or may not include:
- Grid size to set the size of each dungeon floor.
- Rule alteration, to change the shape and style of the rooms / corridors.
- Enemy and item swapping and customizing.

This project is of great interest to me. I built a text based Diablo game using my calculator 15 years ago back when I was in school, and when I startThis project is of great interest to me. I built a text based Diablo game using my calculator 15 years ago back when I was in school, and when I started playing Spark one of the my first game ideas was to develop a Spark based version of it. On the calculator I used a random number generator to cause random encounters, treasures, occurences to happen while you are in the dungeon, and planned to do something similar. To think that an actual random dungeon level could be created using Spark could dramatically change my planned game. So far I only got as far as creating the town hub/cathedral, river etc, and put the project on hiatus while I saved for Massive world pack (which I later bought with cash). Since then I have been working on other projects but my DIablo style game has always been sitting there waiting to be worked on. In the past week I have been working on enemies to encounter in the dungeon, but the work on the dungeon is on hold for now. More ...

I would be interested in any feature requests you may have for this starter kit. You can check out various videos of the project from my Xbox recordedI would be interested in any feature requests you may have for this starter kit. You can check out various videos of the project from my Xbox recorded videos at: http://xboxdvr.com/Daimwn More ...